Azam Gill's Blog

by Dr. Azam Gill, in Different Truths, September 7, 2025

“The 9/11/2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers spawned industrial-scale conspiracy theories anchored in the victims’ suffering and public wrath, attributing malafide premeditation to the ineffectualness of intelligence analyses.
The hijackers of the 9/11 attack on civilians in the Twin Towers, weaponized themselves, civilian aircraft and their unwitting passengers. They harvested nearly 3000 dead and thousands more injured, shook the world. The domino effect, disrupted the world order, still tottering in proxy wars of attrition.
Maud Quessard & Élie Baranetsa of The Institute of Strategic Research of the French Armed Forces, (IHEDN), believe…”

To read the full article in Different Truths, click here: https://www.differenttruths.com/uncovering-9-11-focus-on-al-qaedas-doctrine-and-us-oversight/

To check out JADINY Just Another Day in New York, the first counterfactual / alternative history thriller on 9/11, offering a bibliography of 167 references, click here: USA https://shorturl.at/NzLWN  UK https://shorturl.at/ognqy

For 5-Star Reviews by distinguished peers and reviewers of JADINY, CLICK here — https://shorturl.at/qiJQjof JADINY, click here:

Reviewed by Dr. Azam Gill

Shubrangshu Roy’s ground-breaking Zara’s Witness has rightly been called “brilliant and original” by Dr. Subhash Kak, researcher, scholar, author, professor and world authority on Indo-European studies and Information Science. In impact, Zara will smile in the company of Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, St Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Gibran’s The Prophet and Coelho’s The Alchemist. After the ersatz blossoming of Maharesh Yogi and Ravi Shankar nudged by the Beatles’ self- grafting, this is a breath of fresh air blown from India’s multi-millennial civilization. It tests the reader’s focus and throws a challenge to finish it and, titillating dormant mechanisms fretting over the essentials of Being.
Reading Zara is not for the faint-hearted.

Yet, Roy is kind, and in the footsteps of Ezra Pound and Eliot he, too, explains, though not in footnotes but in his End Note, which is worth the wait.
Ancient Indic wisdom is often retrieved from an interlocking framework of overlapping stories in which birth, name changes, and mutation predate, exceed and outshine Gabriel Garcia Marques’ adored time travel and, Zara does full justice to that convention, enhanced by the author’s own talent at crafting and orchestrating twists in the meticulous plotting.

Roy has taken “… the four stages of life as per ancient Indic wisdom: the Brahmacharya Ashrama, the Grihastha Ashrama, the Vanaprastha Ashrama and finally the Sannyasa Ashrama” and reversed the order in his courageous undertaking. To fully appreciate the scope of his philosophical intrepidity requires, of course, proportionate courage and fortitude on the part of the reader!
Yet, Roy does not hesitate to take icons from popular western culture, strip them to the bone and let them loose to find their own place within the core and expression of his Indic perception.

And at the end of the day, Zara’s Witness is a father’s loving care for his daughter, miles ahead of General Ingles’ Soldier’s Prayer for his son.

My complaints?
Why did I have to be submitted to a whole series of eeks, outahs, remembahs, wannas, lotsas outas etc of the ‘hey daddy-O’ hip era? Roy’s plums of peace seek shores of peace where the tired, poor, huddled masses can land, to breathe freely and attain peace for the sum of their existence.
Zen, Daddy-O, and thanks for an enriching read!

His latest novel is the first counterfactual historical thriller on 9/11 — JADINY: Just Another Day in New York.

Published in Different Truths on June 16, 2025. Written by Dr. Azam Gill, author of JADINY: Just Another Day in New York, the only counterfactual historical thriller on 9/11.

Dr. Azam Gill elucidates that fiction reshapes reality — counterfactual and dystopian genres ask ‘what-if’ to warn, teach and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.

Dr. Azam Gill elucidates that fiction reshapes reality — counterfactual and dystopian genres ask ‘what-if’ to warn, teach and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.

Dr. Azam Gill elucidates that fiction reshapes reality — counterfactual and dystopian genres ask ‘what-if’ to warn, teach and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.

“Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? …” – Margaret Atwood, Booker Prize laureate.

The Bard himself took popular tales, asked himself questions, reworked them with plot twists and ‘what-ifs,’ submitted them to his genius, and his renown transcends time and space.

What if Khalid ibn al-Walid had lost to Heraclius at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 and Abdel Kader had won the Battle of Tours against Charles Martel in 732? What if the Mahrattas had won the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, Nelson had lost the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1817 or Confederate General Robert. E. Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg in 1863? How would the world have unfolded then, and where would we have been today?

Or if Hitler had won the war and England had been occupied, as in Robert Harris’s best-selling 1992 novel, Fatherland. The answers to these questions acquire the status of didactic fiction that instructs within an entertaining framework.

Click here

Truth through Lies: Counterfactual Literature as Remedial Therapy

to read the full article by Dr. Azam Gill, author of JADINY: Just Another Day in New York, the only counterfactual historical thriller on 9/11, available worldwide.

Frederick Forsyth of The Day of the Jackal fame: “If the nine inner US intelligence agencies and the seven outer agencies had been doing their jobs in 2001, 9/11 would never have occurred.” And it would have been — JADINY: JUST ANOTHER DAY IN NEW YORK— Azam Gill’s didactic, counterfactual, historical thriller about the 9/11 twin tower attacks, published by Sabre & Quill, available on Amazon worldwide.

Operations Owlhoot, Scimitar and Trident show how it would have gone down, with dedicated junior officers risking their lives and careers to follow and coordinate every clue, across the world.

Star-crossed lovers and operatives Saint John ‘Sinjin’ Kilvington, ex-SAS and French Foreign Legion, and school-teacher-spy Nathalie Le Viallon, are requisitioned from paradise.
Ordinary citizens blaze their names for eternity.
With 174 bibliographical references

by Azam Gill,

“Azam suggests that the 2024 “Day of the Jackal” series reimagine Forsyth’s classic, incorporating modern moral complexities and character divergences, an exclusive for Different Truths,” published on 10 March 2025.

The November 2024 Sky Atlantic television thriller series is the eighth creative venture capitalising Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 ground-breaking novel, Day of the Jackal. Resurrected, refitted and written by Ronan Bennett, starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, and directed by Brian Kirk, Anthony Philipson, Paul Wilmshurst and Anu Menon, it has garnered two Golden Globe nominations, Best Television Series, and Best Actor for Redmayne.

Seven steps lead to the corpus of convergences and divergences between the 1971 and the 2024 Jackals.
The origins of the nickname Jackal.
The myth and reality of snipers.
The British army’s fascination with lowly animals.
The Jackal in thrillers.
The real-life jackal.
Assassins and serial killers.
Irony and the attraction of evil.
Life and art, greed and integrity, act and intention, unify these components.

…………. Read the full article in Different Truths: click below
https://www.differenttruths.com/spotlight-analysing-the-psychology-of-the-jackal-in-fiction-life/

Dr. Azam Gill reviews Dr Santosh Bakaya’s SUNSET IN A CUP, a collection of 78 poems that employs vivid imagery and insightful metaphors, exclusively for Different Truths.

The starburst of sophisticated sensory images in Dr Santosh Bakaya’s collection of seventy-eight poems, Sunset in a Cup, offers an epicurean feast of the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile, uninhibitedly flirting with the senses. Emily Dickinson’s poem inspires the title, and Santosh Bakaya’s introductory prose is poetical. She retrieves and owns Dickinson’s imagery, elevating it to another dimension with laudable control over each thematic pearl, strung with passion. A collection of seventy-eight previously published poems, now consolidated in a single volume for justified impact and pleasure.

Emily Dickinson’s cup had sunset in it. Santosh’s cup runneth over into the saucer without an overflow on her refined embroidery.

Read the full article in Different Truths, Focus, published on 8 February 2025
https://www.differenttruths.com/focus-themes-of-liberation-in-sunset-in-a-cup/

by Azam Gill, Dec 25, 2024, in Different Truths

Azam recounts an experience in Tahiti, on the way to Teahupo’o, where a traffic jam transformed into a Polynesian party, showcasing the locals’ civilised and joyful approach to unexpected delays, exclusively for Different Truths.

We drove down from Papaeete to Teahupo’o to my daughter and son-in-law’s campsite, only 500 meters from the waves where the 2024 surfing events for the summer Olympics were held. Grandma Mamie’s well-tried Nissan people carrier welcomes weekend odds and ends without complaining about packing space. When my daughter takes the wheel, she puts the car into steady motion and then tends to relax by crossing her left leg over the right thigh without, of course—phew—grabbing the left ankle with her right hand.
A mite worrying, to which she reacts with a delighted smile: “Papaaa, it’s an automatic, so my foot doesn’t need to hover over the clutch.”

After brief stops at two breathtaking waterfalls, we took up the road again, petitioning for good luck to the estuaries spilling their gurgling flow from the mountains into the sea and munching home-made snacks bought from roadside stalls. The scent of tipanier frangipani flowers and the small basket of mangoes—the size, taste, and aroma of the Malda variety—suffused the car.
Read the full article in Different Truths, published on 25 December 2024
https://www.differenttruths.com/a-polynesian-road-trip-fruits-flowers-the-spirit-of-iaorana/

Tahitian Sunset

Azam’s memoir explores the complexities of partition, highlighting loss, reunion, cultural exchange, and the power of human connection in a family’s journey across borders, exclusively for Different Truths.

Read More here https://www.differenttruths.com/love-across-borders-a-familys-journey-in-time-and-traditions-part-two/

BAD-DAD AND UNCLE Choudhry Mohammed Hussein, his boss, weren’t just content with a sumptuous tea party to reset our emotional equilibrium. They took the necessary steps for us to be able to claim a semblance of partial victory over defeat for the sake of our life-long mental health.

Cashing in favours, they cajoled and bullied an exit and entry visa for one-mum and two children for India, though not Kashmir. The family from Kashmir would come down to Indian Punjab. Although we would not be able to visit one-mum’s parental home on Residency Road, Jammu, we would be able to meet our blood relatives. It was some sort of a bureaucratically paranoid one-parent-two-children type exit visa, also ensuring that Bad-dad and bhaijan staying back would guarantee against any hanky-panky us three might get up to in India. Or, if it was all five of us, we might just cross the border and announce our defection!

by Azam Gill

In 1960, the Indo-Pakistani conflict impacted Azam’s family reunion, highlighting the enduring bonds of family across borders and the human cost of political strife. An exclusive

WHEN my mother, sister and I went to India, it was still five years short of the ill-thought out and unnecessary 1965 war which ensured that cousins reeling from the fratricidal madness of the 1947 massacres, topped by the 1948 Kashmir War, would remain mired in deadly squabbles over self-identification, self-image and real estate. And ‘sir jee,’ the now ubiquitous cross-border, visa-free form of address linking vernacular Urdu and vernacular Hindi speakers in a sycophantic doublet had not even been conceived.

In 1959, General Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, had promoted himself to Field Marshal, not because of any laurels in battle field generalship, but only because he could. There was nobody to oppose him and, if there had been, he was sure that the result of the impending 1965 war predicted by his ‘son’ Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, progeny of a ‘Sir,’ brought up by an English nanny and, groomed by good old Berkley and Oxford, would take care of it.

We all know how that went down!

Read More here https://www.differenttruths.com/love-hope-and-heartbreak-a-1960-journey-through-history-i/